Veteran educator M. Lee Pelton, currently president and CEO of the Boston Foundation, has been elected a BU trustee. Photo courtesy of Pelton

New Trustee

Lee Pelton, Veteran Educator and Philanthropic Leader, Joins BU Board of Trustees

Boston Foundation CEO and president’s two-year term begins in April

M. Lee Pelton, who spent almost half a century in higher education, capped by the presidencies of two schools, has been elected to BU’s Board of Trustees for a two-year term, beginning in April.

Since last June, Pelton has been president and CEO of the Boston Foundation, a philanthropy with $1.6 billion in assets that supports nonprofits, companies, and donors in greater Boston. He joined the foundation after a decade as president of Boston’s Emerson College, which in turn followed 13 years as president of Willamette University in Salem, Oreg.

“We’re very pleased that Lee Pelton has agreed to join the Board,” said Boston University President Robert A. Brown in welcoming Pelton. “He brings a wealth of experience and insight at a critical time for our nation, the city of Boston, and higher education. I look forward to working with him.”

“I’m both honored and grateful to have been asked to serve as a Boston University trustee,” Pelton says. “I’m a great admirer of President Brown’s transformational leadership and stewardship at BU, and I very much look forward to working with President Brown, his senior team, and the trustees as Boston University continues to grow in excellence and wonder.

“Moreover, I’m especially grateful that I will be able to continue my connection with the academic life, an enterprise to which I have devoted the entirety of my professional career. These are challenging and important times for higher education, and I look forward to helping ensure the University’s place in the vitality of Boston and its global reach in research and education.”

Pelton began his academic career as an English instructor at Harvard while studying for his doctorate in English literature there in the 1970s and 80s, specializing in 19th-century British poetry and prose. Following graduation he was for three years a senior tutor at Harvard’s Winthrop House. (He later served as a Harvard overseer and vice chair of its executive committee.)

In 1988, he left for Colgate University to become dean of students and dean of the college. He later was dean of Dartmouth College before being chosen president of Willamette University in Oregon in 1998.

He led Willamette until 2011, when he began a decade as president of Emerson College in Boston. 

Named last year to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce’s Academy of Distinguished Bostonians, Pelton has received numerous additional honors, including the Governor’s Award from Mass Humanities, the Robert Coard Distinguished Leadership Medal (2021), and a namesake grant for racial justice created by the Eos Foundation. He was one of Boston magazine’s 100 Most Influential Bostonians in 2021—his fourth time on the list. The Boston Business Journal named him one of the 50 Most Powerful Leaders in Boston in 2018 and 2020.

Pelton has honorary degrees from the Urban College of Boston, Wichita State University, and Tokyo International University.

He has augmented his professional work with service in higher education groups, among them the American Council on Education (former chair of its board), the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, the American Association of Colleges & Universities, and the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts.

The new BU trustee also serves on the board of directors of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce (executive committee, nominating and governance committee, cochair), and on the boards of public radio and television’s GBH and the Barr Foundation, one of the nation’s leading philanthropic organizations, with more than $3 billion in assets.